Located on the remote shores of Japan’s Aichi prefecture, Mori Michi Ichiba festival starts off as a fairly ordered affair. The scent of yakitori skewers wafts across the beach and attendees seem surprisingly cooperative with the rules prohibiting photographs of the performers. However, as night begins to fall and the opening notes of Ralph’s rap anthem “Get Back” reverberate across the sand, the dynamic changes. New Era snapback caps – modified with towels to stave off the Summer heat – fill the crowd and fists pump in the air. Within a few 140 beats, the no photographing rule became virtually unenforceable. “Show me your ones, show me your twos, trigger fingers du-du-du-du!” Ralph barks, instructing the young crowd on how to fire off their gun fingers in real time. The idyllic beach surroundings transformed into something resembling an illegal rave in the UK. How did this happen?

Whether “Get Back” can be classified as grime (as one Redditor postulated), or drill (as Ralph’s manager and one-half of production duo Double Clapperz, Shintaro Yonezawa, insisted), or something entirely new altogether, it was hard to deny its connection to UK culture – replete with references to Air Force 1s and wheel-ups. Racking up over seven million views on Spotify since its 2023 release, the track has cemented Ralph and featured artists JUMADIBA and Watson at the forefront of Japan’s new wave of rappers. From grime and bassline right through to jersey house and drill, these artists are welcoming a wealth of Western rap influences into the country’s mainstream, and signalling a turning point in the scene as a whole.

Rap music is by no means new to Japan. In fact, thanks to a significant Japanese population living in New York in the 70s and 80s, the country is written into the origin story of hip hop itself. Japanese businessman Hiroshi Fujiwara is said to have brought some of the genre’s first records back to Japan after a trip to New York in 1980 and, more widely, tracks like Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Riot in Lagos“ and Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Computer Game“ pioneered the digital drum patterns and electro-style synthesisers that later became central to hip hop. One of the genre’s ‘four godfathers’, Afrika Bambaataa, even cited the group as a key influence behind his debut album Planet Rock. 

Grime arrived promptly, too. Sitting down with Dazed in a locals’ izakaya bar in Shibuya, Japanese MC Pakin describes how he discovered the foundational grime album Boy in the Corner in 2004 while reading a copy of music magazine Black Music Review, and was immediately drawn to the rebellious, underdog-like character on the cover. Home internet had not yet reached his small hometown in Fukushima prefecture, and so Pakin spent the evenings of his secondary school years using the class computer, trawling early grime forums in an attempt to get a grasp on a culture which was still only finding its feet in East London at the time.